Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s new book, Original Sin, about the coverup of Biden’s physical and mental decline while in office, is coming out in a few days, and already-published excerpts are causing an uproar in the political and journalism worlds. Charlie, on today’s edition of The Editors, worries that the tell-all and the coverage surrounding it aren’t actually telling all.
“The purpose of this book, and all the pieces that have sprung up around it, is to memory-hole what was a deliberate, conscious, concerted attempt to cover up the state of the president of the United States in a way that was detrimental to an open and free democratic society and to the security of the American government,” Charlie said.
Charlie stressed that “this is not a complicated story. This was not the sort of topic that required huge numbers of journalists with special skills to engage in forensic reporting. . . . This was obvious to anyone with eyes. And the way that I know that is that a supermajority of the American public by 2022, 2023, had come to the conclusion that Joe Biden was too old to be president of the United States. In fact, one poll had about half of American voters saying that they thought Biden would die in the course of a second term.”
What’s most frustrating to him, however, is that National Review writers have been pointing out for years what the mainstream media are focusing on now. “It wasn’t only National Review by any stretch,” Charlie said, “but just National Review — go through and read it. Read it from me and you and Jim and Jeff. Every other podcast, we referred to it in some manner as early as 2021. Because it was obvious that he was too old. And what did we get in return? We got called names. We got told that we were spreading scurrilous partisan rumors. We got told that we were a disappointment to William F. Buckley Jr.”
“I just don’t think that we ought to allow this book, however good it is, to be used to whitewash what was one of the great scandals of political journalism, and also within the White House, of government deceit in American history.”
The Editors podcast is recorded on Tuesdays and Fridays every week and is available wherever you listen to podcasts.